


Love In Our Realities

by ProPinkist



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Introspection, Meta, also I'm referring to platonic love here okay, could it even be called a fanfic???, except when talking about Monika's love for me at first, it's just me sharing my thoughts about everything in a creative writing style, this game gave me a lot of feels and I love it so much, what even is this, with me as the player in the story lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 11:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13973817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProPinkist/pseuds/ProPinkist
Summary: They all loved me. It was the best and worst feeling in the world.





	Love In Our Realities

**Author's Note:**

> Imagine for the sake of this that the True/Good ending is the only one to get, and that Monika's letter at the end of the normal ending is paired with it instead of Dan Salvato's letter.
> 
> This is some kind of weird... meta thing that probably only barely passes as an actual fanfiction, since it's just me as the player sharing all my feels lol; no "entering the game" or communicating happens or anything unusual like in other fics. So in that regard I guess it's a self-insert introspective story? xD I just really love DDLC, and the ending bits in particular resonated with me a lot, so I wanted to explore why that is, as well as other thoughts that everyone else has probably already said somewhere in their own way. I've never played a game before that has characters that know they're in a game and uses that to so effectively connect you to them (and hurt you lol), even if that's only a small part of the whole thing; it's really powerful and creative and I loved that about it most of all, more than any of the horror aspects (although I loved all the creativity with that too). Ugh I just LOVE THESE GIRLS SO MUCH AND WISH THEY COULD BE HAPPY PERMANENTLY. ;____;

_“I wanted to thank you for spending so much time with us all. You worked so hard to make each and every one of us happy. You comforted us through our hard times. And you helped us all get along with each other. Only someone who truly cares about the Literature Club would go as far as you did. But… All along, that’s all I ever wanted. For everyone to be happy and care about each other. …It’s kind of sad, you know? After all you’ve done for us, there isn’t much I can do for you in return. We’ve already reached the end of the game. So… This is where we say goodbye. Thank you for playing Doki Doki Literature Club.”_

_“For the time it lasted, I want to thank you.”_

_“I’m going to miss you. Come visit sometime, okay?”_

_“Thank you for making all of my dreams come true.”_

_“We’ll always be here for you.”_

_“For being a friend to all of the club members.”_

_“We… **We all love you.”**_

**_“With everlasting love, Monika.”_ **

 

When I read those words, from an emotional Sayori smiling at me through her tears and on a final piece of paper with Monika’s ever-familiar script, I began to cry.

It was a feeling unlike any I’d ever felt before. Years and years, I have experienced stories, gone through narratives, watched characters adventure, learn, grow, laugh, joke, cry, love, hate, mourn, betray, be betrayed, find family, find romance, feel lost, find hope again, be bitter, be angry, be insecure, be saved, feel loved, feel peaceful, die, and everything in between. I have experienced it all, and have felt all of those emotions with them. And yet, I am always the outsider looking in, watching everything unfold and feeling what I feel, knowing it isn’t real, but wishing it was. Or rather, wishing that I could enter that world, whichever world it may be at the time, when I feel like it’s the only place for me, when I feel like my own, “real” world gives me nothing of value, where I could be with the characters I loved with all my heart.

More important than anything else, I would finally be able to tell them how much I love them, how much they mean to me, how much they have done for me, how amazing and strong and beautiful and inspiring they are. How much I cheer for them, how much I weep for them when they suffer, and how much I always wish I could make their suffering go away, and how happy I am when they overcome it. How, even when they think they are all alone, they have someone caring for them, in me and a million others out there.

I know others know this feeling, too.

And now, here, in this short, fleeting game that had such an unassuming premise and appearance, these girls had felt my love for them. And I felt their love in return.

Sayori said that she couldn’t give anything back to me, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. She appreciated me, even though she hardly understood the concept of who I even was.

…I hadn’t been able to save them. Hadn’t been able to save Monika from her grief, and despair, and desperation, and insanity, and regret, and loneliness, and longing. Hadn’t been able to save Sayori from the same dreaded epiphany and knowing afterwards. Hadn’t had the time to help Sayori through her depression, and help Yuri stop from harming herself, and help Natsuki find a safer and happier home situation or at least make sure she always had food, before everything got interrupted. Everything I _would_ have been able to do, I imagine, if Monika hadn’t interfered with the story. …Well, not _me_ , but close enough.

And yet still… they thanked me, for what little I had been given the choice and ability to do for them.

It hurt. It felt wonderful, too. It felt… bittersweet. Sayori’s favorite word. Happy to know that they felt loved and grateful for what I had done, but sad that I couldn’t do so much more and spend so much more time with them.

Even Monika felt the same as Sayori did. Even after I deleted her and indicated that I didn’t want to spend time with her anymore. Even after that, she still loved me; she still restored the others; still thanked me for everything once it all had to end.

Monika…

In the end, I didn’t hate her. How could I? I didn’t have the right to.

What she did was cruel, and wrong, and horrible, and could not be entirely excused. …But knowing what she went through, hearing her situation firsthand, how could we say we wouldn’t do the exact same things in her surreal, terrifying situation?

Living in a world that ended within the confines of the small story that was supposed to exist. Talking to people that could only act within the confines of their scripted lines and personalities. Were they 2D, literally? Were there _floating textboxes?_ Not to mention the “endless cacophony of meaningless noise” I now knew was how Monika described the screeching sounds and bottomless darkness she experienced every time the game was off or she wasn’t onscreen.

Anyone would go insane upon seeing their world like that; a kind of horror unlike anything us humans could ever comprehend. Anyone would _die_ eventually from that… until someone else who knew about it came along.

All Monika had wanted was to be with me. _Me_ , not the character in the game who I played. It was the only possible way she could be happy, feel relief, after she had had her epiphany, wasn’t it?

I too, feel a similar feeling: the feeling of wanting to be with those on the other side of the wall that separated our realities. Me wanting to be in the world of fiction, and Monika wanting to be in the world of… nonfiction, for lack of better wording. The _hole in the wall_ , as she had put it, went both ways.

I can’t do anything about it on my end. But Monika had gotten as damn close as she could to crossing the wall through sheer tenacity, determination, and stubbornness. And desperation.

But all that had amounted to was sitting in an empty, desolate room with no more life in it but her, her staring into my eyes as she spoke an endless stream of thought-provoking and wise conversations, as well as compliments and words of love, me unable to respond.

It was nice, though, for a while. Monika made me feel loved. Monika made me feel good about myself. She told me to take care of myself, to get enough sleep, to come to her if I was having a bad day, to think about seeing a therapist if I needed to, to read, to help my friends with depression, to try being a vegetarian for once, to tell her if I ever wanted to stop talking for a while. She taught me how to argue successfully, how to be satisfied with my progress in things I’m passionate about, how to avoid sinking time into the internet. She talked about her history, her favorite color, her twitter account she somehow had, her thoughts about God, education, food, mental health, weather, and writing topics.

Monika talked about the game. She talked about wanting to change the music, wondered why people enjoy playing dating sims with such unnatural character archetypes such as tsunderes and yanderes in the first place, wondered about why the game is most likely set in Japan if the classrooms feel American and the game is in English, and wished she had different clothes to wear.

She told stories about themselves. About how Yuri had brought wine to the club one day and freaked them all out. About how she wished the club could have had a rapper at some point.

About Sayori hanging herself incorrectly, and how she asphyxiated rather than broke her neck, and how she desperately tried to free herself before that could happen, bloodying her hands in the process. She probably had changed her mind, but easier to assume that it was just her survival instincts kicking in, Monika told me.

About how much we had to make sure Monika’s character file wasn’t deleted. About how _I_ was real, and she was real, and none of the others were.

It felt like almost every conversation ended with a reassurance of how perfect I was to Monika, and how much reminiscing over the club and its previous members no longer mattered because of how none of it was real ~~(though it more felt like Monika was reassuring _herself_ of this than she was me)~~.

It was comforting. It was unnerving. It was relaxing. It was uncomfortable. It was thoughtful. It was lonely. It was calm. It was terrifying. It was… loving.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before in a game. Where did she learn all of this information? Was the past she spoke of before the game actually something that happened, or were they all just memories implanted into her and the others? She must have learned all of this wisdom once she became sentient… but I thought all that existed was the script and code within the game’s narrative; how could she have been able to learn as much as she had in such a confined world even with realizing it was a game? Did that mean her wisdom _was_ just implanted in her and were things she would have shared in the original story? That made more sense… Her memories of before the game must have been real, too, since Monika was originally part of the debate club, and didn’t realize the truth of her world until becoming president of the Literature Club, and then had some time considering deleting herself before she had said I had come along… but how could that past even _exist?_

So many questions she could not answer.

But I grew attached to her. I wished it was real.

It _was_ real.

…To Monika, at least.

But at the end of the day, after hearing it all, it wasn’t even close to what I would want for a relationship. Never closing the game? Taking her with me on a flash drive whenever I had to leave so she could always be with me? Never being able to talk _back_?

That wasn’t real love. It was a one-sided, fake romance. How could I love someone who knew nothing about me, and was only telling me exactly what anyone would want to hear? She made me happy, but things couldn’t stay like this forever. We didn’t have what she thought we did, and never would, even if she could talk to me infinitely.

So, I deleted Monika. I murdered her, just like she had, indirectly and directly, murdered the others. Was it wrong of me, even though she had just told me a little while ago that killing things in a game didn’t make me a murderer? It was. But I didn’t have a choice.

It still hurt, though. It hurt so much. Hurt to know what Monika had done, hurt to know that we could never have what she wanted more than anything else, and hurt to know that this was the only way for me to get on with my life, and end the game.

Monika did horrible things to her friends, no matter the reasons. She made her friend’s depression unbearably worse within the span of four days, leading her to kill herself out of a sudden need to punish herself for things she hadn’t done wrong. She made her other friend’s self-harm habits much worse, made her unstable, psychotic, disturbing to be around, and in the end, suicidal as well. She made her third friend’s parental abuse turn physical, and starved her even more because of it. She made an innocent bystander have to find his best friend dead in her bedroom after having killed herself, and made him have to stare at another dead girl’s rotting corpse for three days straight in an otherwise empty room, without being able to move or even scream.

It was one thing to call Sayori, Yuri, Natsuki, and the protagonist fake entities that could only follow the script and didn’t truly feel any of the emotions they pretended to, and yet, they all reacted with fear to their sudden personality changes at different points in time, even if they weren’t aware of the truth of their universe. That made everything so much more chilling, so much more terrifying, so much more _wrong._

Most of all, Monika affected _me_ , her special someone. She scared me. She traumatized me. She made me cry, and not in a good way. She hurt me. She made me _angry_ that I couldn’t see the story of the _Doki Doki Literature Club_ girls as it was meant to play out, for my sake and for theirs.

Why hadn’t she just come to me in the beginning, before everything, instead of putting everyone through such long, drawn-out suffering? She had said she hadn’t wanted to delete anyone originally, and had just wanted to make everyone else unlikeable so the protagonist, and thus me, would stay away from them… but that was much, much crueler than simply deleting them from the very start. I still wouldn’t have liked it, but I wouldn’t have been nearly as disgusted and horrified, and it wouldn’t have put Monika through so much frustration.

Why hadn’t Monika just thought of that, if she was that desperate?

…It just showed how much she really cared about her friends that she called nothing but fake, deep down, that she still wanted them around even if they would be nothing but twisted, hollow versions of their original selves.

She had lost her mind. She was desperate, insane, but still cared, even if she tried to lie to herself about the fact that she did.

So I couldn’t hate her. All I could do was hurt for her, even more than I was hurt by her.

Monika was nothing but a child. When I deleted her, she lashed out at me, like a child, for doing so; for breaking her trust in me, for pretending to be kind only to backstab her later, and accused me of destroying the last bit of what was left in the game’s universe. She called me sick. She reminded me that she had loved me. That I was all she had left. And that I hadn’t cared about any of it.

I couldn’t entirely blame her for feeling that way. Even after everything she had done, nothing felt worse in the game than this moment to me.

Especially when she changed her mind a few moments later and told me that she couldn’t help still loving me.

As much as Monika seemed to know, as much as she could do with the coding, as mature and confident as she acted, and despite knowing that she was in a _game_ , and was able to get around the rules of the game… she still wasn’t real. She still wasn’t part of the real world. Everything she learned, everything she thought for herself, came from this fictional, unnatural version of the real world. Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki might have felt more realistic than other characters of their type I had seen before, but a tsundere was still a tsundere, and like Monika herself had said, people exactly like Natsuki, and Yuri, didn’t exist in my world. In the same way, Monika herself was not someone who would exist in our world, with her limited, obsessive, naïve and one-dimensional idea of how romance was supposed to happen.

She came from a dating sim. So what else would she do with her sudden knowledge and freedom, out of the many choices at her fingertips, but specifically seek to fall in love with the person on the other side of the wall?

Monika was not a route in the game, but ironically, it must have been the inevitability that she had mentioned earlier that made it impossible for her not to fall in love with me, and as she cried to me upon realizing how wrong and selfish and disgusting everything she had done was, that no one would do such things to the person that they loved, and that it all must have been why I hated her and deleted her, I knew I was finally seeing the true Monika. The Monika that had gone insane upon realizing that she lived in a digital reality. The Monika that had been desperate to reach the real world, or at least as close as she could get to it, and so had taken such drastic, terrifying actions to make sure that happened. …The Monika that had always loved her friends, and the Literature Club, real or not.

The tragic reality of a game character become sentient, who realized that her world was not real, not normal, not _free_. When stripped of the maturity and knowledge that was part of her original character design, and the mask she had kept up for most of the game (she _had_ talked about faking confidence, hadn’t she?), this was what was left of Monika.

A child.

I often think about the moment in the first loop, when the three of them were fighting over the idea of adding new members to the club, and Monika had slumped at a desk, asking out loud if perhaps creating the club had been a mistake, and wondering what the point of it all was. Hindsight led me to believe she was upset that all of her attempts to get closer to me so far had failed, but right then, even before I learned everything I did later, I wondered if she still, genuinely, wished to make the Literature Club as fun and interesting as possible, and had begun to realize that her meddling with the code was ruining something she had still wanted to be a part of, despite everything.

Playing the game again with the protagonist, Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki safe and happy again should have been a relief, but all it felt was wrong; bittersweet, yet again. Deleting Monika turned out to be the only way for her to realize her faults, and try to make it up to me, but she was still wrong about things. Things I would never be able to tell her but desperately wished I could have, then. That I hadn’t delete her because I hated her, because I had never wanted to see her again, but because what she had created wasn’t what I wanted in a relationship, with anyone, wasn’t what was _right,_ something that she would never be able to truly understand without being in my world. That I felt sorry for her, despite everything, and appreciated the sentiment at least behind what she had tried to do for me. That it hurt me to delete her. That I wished I hadn’t had to do it.

That I didn’t want to start a new game with her gone, because the game – no, the world, the _club_ , wouldn’t be complete without her, unlike what she thought; she was part of the _family._ That the best way for her to atone for her actions would be staying in the story as she was supposed to. That I had known for a while now how much she loved her friends, and how much it hurt her, deep down, to do what she did, even if she couldn’t acknowledge it or understand it herself.

Monika’s song to me, at the end, the one she had been practicing the notes for the entire game, spoke all about her yearning for me, her confusion and desperation in how to reach me, her insecure feelings, her regret and horror at what she had done to her friends, and ultimately, her sad, bittersweet resignation at the fact that she didn’t truly know how to love me as long as she could not reach my world, and so, she would let me go.

It broke my heart. I wished I could have made it easier for her; all I wanted was to tell her everything myself.

I truly believed that the others would have forgiven their friend, if Monika had decided to stay and had somehow restored their memories from before. Perhaps, if everyone knew the truth, they would all be able to weather it together, instead of Monika being all alone with her terrifying knowledge. Since Natsuki and Yuri had been able to act on their own outside of Monika’s control in the first loop, maybe they would be able to live out a story that could break past the set story of the route system, without me playing.

In the end, Sayori did forgive Monika, implicitly. Even if it was in the saddest way I ever could have imagined.

Their words made me unbelievably touched, and happy, and emotional. But I didn’t want this ending. I had never expected things to end like this. How could we all say goodbye here, after so little real time together, after everything that had happened? When all of them deserved so much more than what I, and the game, could give them?

Why did the club president always _know_? What kind of cruelty was that? What made the game do that; how _could_ it do that?

They deserved better. They all did. I wished they could have a story that was happier, more uplifting, more touching, like I knew _Doki Doki Literature Club_ could have been, with how mature and tasteful its writing and characterization had been early on. The girls sensing when Sayori was having one of her harder days, and being kind and supporting to her throughout them; “hugging the raincloud”, as she had put it. The girls getting into manga for Natsuki’s sake, and enjoying it, and helping her get away from her neglectful father, or at the very least pitching together and making sure that she always had enough to eat every day. Yuri reading manga, and her fantasy and horror novels, and making her tea, and the girls perhaps telling someone else in the school about her self-harm, in order to help Yuri break out of the worrisome habit. Monika being the confident and encouraging leader she is, without the existential crisis looming over her.

Just a warm, comforting, supportive world, story. With four people, maybe five, and maybe love would happen, but maybe it wouldn’t. Just being a group of friends would be more than enough.

……Or, if the game was always doomed to give awareness to the person in the role of club president no matter what, would that I could bring them all to my world, to the _real_ world, where they could find friends and happiness and support outside of the confines of their visual novel dating sim, where one of them would always be lonely and afraid in a way the others would never be able to understand, and one of the others would always fall in love with the player character.

Either way, freedom and love and friendship.

But none of that could happen. And so we all had to say goodbye, no matter how much it made me cry.

Neither Monika or Sayori could ever truly understand what it meant to exist in a fictional world. But they did, apparently, know one thing: they knew how much I loved them all. Whether it was from going through all of their routes in the beginning, to spending those hours listening to Monika talk to me alone even if I was going to delete her afterwards, they had enough semblance of understanding to know how much I cared about them. How I wanted to care more. How I wanted all of them to be together, somehow, happy and free. How I didn’t want to leave them, just as much as they didn’t want to leave me. How I would have kept writing and reading poems with them forever, if I could have.

When I first downloaded _Doki Doki Literature Club,_ it was because I had heard that this game was different from other visual novels out there. I had expected a dark experience. What I hadn’t expected was such overwhelming emotion, feelings of gratitude… and love.

Sometimes I feel bad, then, for putting them through their misery. …But if I hadn’t played, Monika would have deleted herself, she had said, while the game was shut down and she suffered so. Even if everything did end up deleted in the end… at least I was able to give them some time of happiness, no matter how short, right?

They loved me, and were able to experience their love for each other. They thanked me, and said they would miss me. They knew I was real, compared to them, and loved me for it anyway. But they also, in their own way, understood that I saw them as “real” as well.

They could never know how much their love made me cry, though.

Even with the knowledge that it would do nothing, I was still inspired to leave a text file of my own in the folder, just in case, in some far-off, distant place, it could get to them, through the hole in the wall. If nothing else, just for my own peace of mind.

_“To The Literature Club Members.txt”_

_“Monika and Sayori, you know who I am. I can’t even express to you all how important you are. How special you are. Each of you are loved, and your club was a wonderful place to be, for as long as it lasted. I would give anything to be able to spend so much more time there, with you._

_Yuri: Your writing is beautiful; I only wish I could write poetry just as well. Keep loving your books and sharing what you love about them. …Please, if you can, try not to feed the raccoon. I cannot say anything that will truly help, because I’ve never been in your situation. But please know how much we worry about you, and love you, and want you to be safe._

_Natsuki: Your way of writing using simple words is just as amazing as anyone else’s, and I absolutely love it, too. I love how you write about deep, thoughtful topics with such light wording. Actually, your style might be my favorite! Keep loving your manga and not being afraid to love it; I love manga too, and it’s not childish at all. I’m sorry you cannot be yourself at home; I wish that wasn’t the case. But the club is always there for you. If you are especially scared or feel lonely, they will always help you, because they love you, as do I._

_Sayori: Your poems are beautiful and make me smile, even when they are sad. You are beautiful, too. We all love you so much, so please never forget that. You are smart, and kind, and brave, and strong, and determined, and we love everything about you. Whenever it’s a little harder than usual, and the raincloud is there, the club will always be there to support you, too. Keep using your writing to help you, and lean on them if you need to. I wish I could support you myself in person, but at least know that I love you too._

_Monika: …I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I could not help you, truly; I’m sorry I could not give you what you wanted. I never hated you, after it all, though, I just hope you know. I know that you are kind, and supportive, and caring, and that you love your friends, and your club. I’m only sorry you had to go through what you did, and that it led to what it did. So much of what you told me in that room meant a lot to me, despite everything, and even if I could not stay with you, I will take so much of what you said to heart. You didn’t deserve to learn the truth, and you deserved more of a spotlight in the game. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it so that you never learned, or that you could come to my world, with everyone else._

_All of you were amazing to be with. I loved you all. I wish I could spend more time with you, but I won’t ask you to continue living in such a scary world. Thank you for making me smile, for helping me write, for being my friends, even if you didn’t know you all were my friends until now – or rather, until the “end” of the game._

_But most of all, thank you for calling me_ your _friend. I wish the game hadn’t been so cruel to you all, and I wish we hadn’t had to say goodbye. …But it, you, gave me something I rarely feel with games… and I’m glad that, amidst all the confusion and fear, you felt that, too._

_Maybe one day in the future, the wall between our realities can be crossed._

_Love,_

_The girl who wanted to be part of your Literature Club”_


End file.
